Our sentence can carry lots of weight and oftentimes we don’t realize this, especially in Kalam. One unguarded sentence can lead to a heresy charge which leads to a metaphysical collapse.

So it goes like this:

one unguarded sentence → one heresy charge → one metaphysical collapse

Lets go through the each part of the flow by example (simplified)

One unguarded sentence

“God has knowledge”

By itself this sentence seems harmless. But in kalam, these questions will arrise:

“Is this knowledge other than God?” “Is it eternal” “Does it subsist?” “Is it distinct from essence?”

One heresy charge

Taking the same example above, in a polemic environment, someone will definitely accuse you:

“You just made attributes into entities” “You just affirmed a plurality in the Divine essence”

Even you don’t mean that, the language licensed the inference.

One metaphysical collapse

Being accused of what you did not mean, you start to defend yourself by denying something you actually need, or affirm something you didn’t intend, or introduce ad hoc distinctions aka short term emergency patches.

In other words instead of tracking reality, you start to track damage control to protect the sentence.

This is the collapse.